A
Sad Symphony With a Happy Ending
Classical music is alive and well

by Alan
Rich

CLASSICAL
MUSIC IS DEAD ONCE AGAIN, and its corpse has never been livelier. The villains
have been variously identified, and the saviors as well.

Audiences dwindle. One faction says the defection has to do with too much
worn-out, familiar repertory. Elsewhere, the defection is blamed on an overdose
of 12-tone, electronic, minimal, Stravinsky. Musicians, too, are on the
waneor so were told now and then. Illustrious string players,
extolled for their Bach and Beethoven, defect to the ranks of Appalachian
fiddlers. Distinguished performing organizations curtail their valuable
services as audiences and, therefore, funds dwindle. The Los Angeles Opera,
buoyed through the beneficence of zillionaire opera buff Alberto Vilar,
has barely squeaked out of a deficitreported as close to $2.5 millionbequeathed
by the previous management. Typical recent casualty: The small but worthy
Los Angeles Mozart Orchestra, obliged to cancel programs last spring [2001],
starts up again this season but with a drastically cut-back schedule.

Bad enough? Consider this: Police officials in Seattle recently devised
a method for clearing public spaces of gatherings of undesirables (druggies,
homeless, composers, etc.). They set up loudspeakers and play classical
music at high volume. The news item (NPR, August 14) didnt say
what music, although Beethoven was mentioned as a generic term for
classical. It did say that the areas cleared presto con moto.
So there we go: classical music as surrogate for the fire hose.

Still, not so bad: Well beyond 10,000 listeners poured into the Hollywood
Bowl the week I wrote these words, not for show tunes or Rachmaninoff, but
for all-Beethoven. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, after a couple of lean
years, reports a 15 percent rise in ticket sales last season over the season
before. The reborn and fizzy Orange County Philharmonic Society, with its
daring programs full of adventure, nevertheless ended its last season with
that rare arts commodity, a six-figure surplus. While record companies here
and abroad pull back their activities on behalf of classical music, a recent
survey by the RAND Corp. turns up the news that opera, considered by many
the most unapproachable of all classical arts, currently boasts the highest
attendance gain of any entertainment category. Best of times, worst of times:
Ol Charles Dickens had it right.

Death and rebirth: It was ever so. On my desk is a recent screed from Englands
Daily Telegraph, wherein Norman Lebrecht, possibly musics most
voluble proclaimer of gloom n doom, celebrates his Requiem
for the Classical Record. That goes on the shelf next to the same
authors Who Killed Classical Music? (1998), Tim Pages
Pulitzer-winning The Way the Music Dies (1996), a sheaf of reviews
from the premiere of Stravinskys Le Sacre du Printemps . .
. all the way back to Onos Lyras (When the ass hears the lyre),
an eloquent defense of music against its naysayers penned by one Marcus
Terentius Varro sometime in the first century B.C. The death of classical
music, writes the pianist/scholar Charles Rosen, is perhaps
its oldest continuing tradition.

Is the death rattle louder this time? Maybe so; certainly the roster of
destructive forces is longer and more fearsome.

The record biz: Once a seemingly indestructible archive of everything
noble in our musical culture, the industry that proclaimed and preserved
the art of Caruso, Heifetz, Toscanini, and Lenny totters on the cusp of
self-destruction. With deadly, biblical accuracy, the fat years have led
to the lean years. When a prospective customer is faced with some 80 Beethoven
Fifthsincluding 10 by the same conductor, Wilhelm Furtwänglerits
easy to understand why he might retire in confusion. Its just as easy
to understand why major retailersmost famously Tower, with its 229
stores in 17 countriesare currently beating a retreat from the full-catalog
inventory on which their customers once relied. Major producersincluding
the once-noble RCA (now BMG) of Caruso and Toscanini famecut back
their recording activities to next to nil. Towerwith others sure to
followreduces its stock of the small independent labels that once
made a visit to a record store a voyage of discovery. Blame some of this
on the deadly competition from that amorphous monster known as the Internet,
where some customers are transformed into armchair shoppers with access
to the web of mail-order dot-coms, and others are lured, via Web browser
and desktop CD-burner, into downloading mere abstract content, bypassing
the traditional thrill of material possession.

The edifice complex: Musics managements project grand new temples
to house their product but must distribute free tickets by the ream to paper
the old temples it already owns. The prevailing marketing philosophy, since
New Yorks Lincoln Center opened in 1962followed two years later
by the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the first component of the Los Angeles
Music Centerhas been to sell music by the container rather than the
content. The resulting paradox is that the grand new buildings, most of
them too large, create a cold, unwelcoming atmosphere. The Music Center
is a case in point: a glum spot, badly lit, with lousy, inadequate food
places, and the absurd design that elevates the whole site above Grand Avenue
and stifles any possibility of street life in the area. Walk along the Grand
Avenue block that borders the Music Center, and you might as well be on
Skid Row for all the cultural emanations you detect. The same sterility
obtains at the fancy new performing-arts center in Costa Mesa, which has
no sense of site at all, only buildings separated by grass. The same at
UCLA, where Royce Hall is miles from any food except the overpriced pastry
they sell inside and the nearby vending machines. All this stifles the joy
in music-going, and also stifles the chance to drive to one place, park,
eat (or even dine), then hear some music, and then hang out and schmooze
afterward. (You want emanations? You want schmooze? Try Manhattans
Broadway alongside Lincoln Center and eat yer heart out.)

Bloat: Our concert halls and opera houses are too big, compared to
the European counterparts they pretend to copy, and compared to the dimensions
of the best music they are meant to house. Mozarts Don Giovanni
was first performed, in Pragues largest theater, to a capacity audience
of 750. The Music Centers Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, like comparable
houses in San Francisco and New York, seats over 3,000. Slickly confident
that if they build it we will come, management tells us little about the
new kinds of music, or the new performance values, that will inundate the
new halls with the sense of their own centurynot merely the cultural
values of bygone centuries superficially modernized. Will there be new music
for new audiences in the new hallsin the Music Centers Walt
Disney Concert Hall now beginning to gleam in the afternoon sun, in the
other new one a-building in Costa Mesa, in the soon-to-be-gutted-and-rebuilt
Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center? And will that new music be, as it deserves
to be, newly defined? No news is bad news.

The failure of the media: Between the magnificence of our musical
culture past and present, and the outside world that might seek admission
to its mysteries, a vast information gap looms. Two radio stations pretend
to serve the classical-music needs (their word, not mine) of
this area: one listener- and tax-supported, the other commercial. Both are
alike in the narrowness of their definition of audience tastes; both recoil
from the notion of broadcasting music of less than mass appeal: no modern
dissonance, no arcane medieval motets (or anything else vocal aside from
a single paltry serving of opera once a week), a no-brain kibble in which
masterpieces are often boiled down to single movements and Boccherini outpoints
Boulez. One of the two stations, at least, generously supports local cultural
activities with preview programs and informational talks. The other ignores
its community, rejects the idea of arousing interest in, say, the Philharmonics
weekly programs with free spot announcements and previews, and, indeed,
originates much of its programming at out-of-town affiliate stations as
far distant as Denver and Boise. You might think that the first of these
would be KUSC, the local public-radio station, and the second would be KMZT,
the citadel of crass commercialism. Actually, its just the opposite.

On the labor front: It cant be the shortage of good performing
talent that leaves time and space on our stages for the likes of David Helfgott,
Andrea Bocelli, and Charlotte Church; something in the panorama of performance-arts
audience passions is drawn to the physical or psychological anomaly that
these misguided practitioners embody, and so tickets get sold. But the situation
among orchestras in the past few years, especially on the East Coast, points
up an even more anomalous situation: the inability of the most prestigious,
famous, and high-paying orchestras to attract and hold on to the conductors
they and their audiences deserve. The New York Philharmonic has made the
most ludicrous choice in hiring the 70-plus, aloof, only moderately musically
interesting Lorin Maazel as the latest accessor to the podium of Mahler,
Toscanini, Walter, and Boulez. The Philadelphia, badly in need of a little
flamboyance in the successor to the solid, stolid Wolfgang Sawallisch, chose
instead the solid, stolid Christoph Eschenbach. And Boston, where Seiji
Ozawa has overstayed his welcome by 25 years minimum, appears headed to
settle for a fraction of James Levines corporate loyalty while he
also remains at the Metropolitan Opera and the Munich Philharmonic. One
promising new conductoran American, for Gods sakecame
over from Paris (where he is an authentic culture hero), made a series of
debuts with East Coast orchestras, was seen and was lavishly praised: the
exceptionally smart, charming and imaginative David Robertson. He deserved
any one (if not all three) of those podiums, but he returned to Paris empty-handed.
Out here, Esa-Pekka Salonen comes on strong, and so does Michael Tilson
Thomas. Its getting so I have a waiting list for my guest sofa, as
do my friends in San Francisco, for East Coast refugees starved for the
sound of a symphony orchestra under exciting and musically honorable leadership.

Music is designed
to express feelings. These are the sole subject of its communication, the
only inner reality it deals with. And the difference between one state of
feeling and another, as expressed in music, is largely a matter of shapeshape
of melody and shape of larger form....

Virgil Thomson, 1961

The product: The wisdom holds, in the calm of Beethovens pastoral
countryside, in the exuberance of a rappers romance with the power
of words. Feelings, communication: Thus far, at
least, the performing arts are alike.

There is no definition of classical music that comes from within
the music itself. The term is confusing. It can refer to music from a specific
periodthe classical era in which a revival of fascination
with the designs of classic architecture permeated the other arts as wellor,
more generally, to music that becomes classic through familiarity,
meant to be heard politely by a silent audience conditioned to applaud only
in the right places. It is music written down by its composer, and therefore
meant to be performed within its given outlines every time, give or take
the enterprise of a specific performer. It is music that is marketed by
being surrounded in a cloud of mystery. Descriptions of it are meant to
be read with heavy emphasis on its foreign terms, preferably with an affected
tone. Practitioners include radios Karl Haas with his prissy overpronunciations,
Mona Golabek (currently into your headphones on American Airlines widebodies)
with her honeyed purr that wraps TLC around artsy blather, andremember?the
immortal Milton J. Cross, master of the singsong rhetorical plush at the
Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in their gaseous heyday. Being performed in
expensive, overlarge halls perpetuates the inscrutable aura that keeps the
helots at bay and welds believers into a secret fellowship.

It is the one art, above all, that involves the outside world as participants
in its very existence. It involves the performer, who contributes a level
of virtuosity (of intellect, of fingers, of the throat) as an overlay to
the work itself. And it involves the rest of us, the listeners, and it sets
the ground rules of that involvement. You can walk past a painting, or take
in the architectural details of a building, at any speed you choose. You
cant do that with musicnot with classical music, anyway. More
important, it involves usat least to the extent of the indulgence
we are willing to volunteerin its process.

Its that process, the composers stipulations on the placement
of landmarks along the predetermined time frame of a piece, that sets classical
music apart fromyoull notice that I didnt say abovethe
other kinds of music with which our universe throbs. Classical musica
Bach fugue, Schuberts Unfinished Symphony, a Pierre Boulez
electronic escapade suspended in both time and spacetakes up time,
in carefully measured segments. The components within that time frame seem
to movetoward us, away from us, perhaps bothin a sequence of
statement, contrast, tension, relaxation. A three-minute fugue from Bachs
Well-Tempered Clavier states its subject, plays it off against itself
in counterpoint that increases in complexity, and resolves the process comfortably
and with high imagination. Some of the same process occurs in the first
movement of Schuberts Unfinished at four times the duration:
a mysterious buzzing, a solo horn call as if from a distant planet, a new
tune as beautiful as human mind has ever fashioned, an alternation of these
contrasting elements, a resolution. Our reaction along the waythe
interplay of tension, surprise, delight, release, more tension, more releaserepresents
our participation in the process. There are different landmarks in the progress
from death to resurrection over the 90 minutes of Mahlers Second Symphony,
and in the passage from void to cataclysm over the 17-plus hours of Wagners
Ring. We may bristle at the abrasive interplay in a contemporary
masterwork like Pierre Boulezs
Répons, but we still cant avoid the wonder of its
communicative process, and we know after its 42-minute expanse that weve
been somewhere, and have returned.

The process, the interaction of hearer and creator, remains the same, Bach
to Boulez and beyond. What makes this kind of music classical
is that the interplay of substance and structure has usually been laid out
in advance. The great jazz people make their music new every time, and that,
too, is wonderful.

Who listens? The
public concert space where ticket buyers assemble to hear music performed
is a fairly recent arrival: 220 years, more or less, out of the millennium
or so of music we think of as accessible. Before, say, 1780, there were
the patrons, the duke or prince with a music room for invited guests, a
cathedral to support a choirmaster and in Italy first, and spreading northwardthe
opera theater with its flocks of prima donnas of all genders and its flocks
of aficionados likewise. By Beethovens time1825, saythe
new leisure class demanded larger halls and larger orchestras making louder
noises in longer symphonies. For the next century and more, a communitys
prestige was defined by its musical amenities. In the Boston of my youth,
almost everybody knew at least two things: where the Red Sox stood in the
league, and what the Boston Symphony was performing that week. (They also
knew that the concerts were invariably sold out.) Even if you didnt
have a ticket to a live concert, you knew to anchor your weekly plans around
the Mets opera broadcasts on Saturday and the New York Philharmonics
on Sunday.

Then came movies, then television, the LP, the CD, the Walkman, MP3, then
everything else in the way of agreeably distracting alternatives to the
notion of sitting well-dressed in a formal concert hall respectfully absorbing
the message from onstage. The gray generations that filled Bostons
Symphony Hall in its golden daysand bustled out in anger at the first
strains of Stravinsky or Shostakovichgave way to the newcomers who
pegged their musical territory to embrace Dylan along with Mahler, Machaut
alongside the Stones, and who found the proscenium arch an unseemly barrier
between them and us. (Some of the best news about Walt Disney Hall, by the
way, is the in-the-round plan for the performance space.)

However splendid the musical offering, the fact remains that the public
concert is an exercise in artificiality. A pianist performing Bachs
Goldberg Variations on the Music Center stageto a full
house of 3,000, if its Murray Perahiais still caught up in music
meant for a single harpsichordist playing for an audience of one. A gritty
new orchestral piece spatchcocked between the overture and the romantic
concerto on a symphony night is taking up space in a room designed for music
of a far different time and place. It is, of course, good that these things
happen. Murray Perahia deserves his sold-out houses, and the new composer
deserves the chance to fight his way toward recognition for his originality,
or to flop in full view for his banality.

Our concert halls are too large for the expectation of ticket sales, and
too large for the shape of the music even in a sold-out house. (More of
the good news about Walt Disney Hall is that there are roughly 1,000 fewer
seats than at the Pavilion. But thats still larger than most of the
best European halls.) Since its a given that no major musical event
breaks even from box-office receipts, even at the disgraceful $148 top for
some of last seasons threadbare L.A. Opera offerings, it makes no
sense to belabor the equation that seat sales equal profits. The one local
exception, of course, is the Philharmonics Hollywood Bowl, whose nearly
18,000 seats serve as cash cow for the orchestras indoor activities.
Nobody suggests, of course, that the concert format at the Bowl could also
serve as the way things might run in Disney; you have to admit, however,
that even on a slow night in Cahuenga Pass, with the expanse of empty seats
big enough to accommodate the Indy 500, the 5,000 who do show up could drive
an indoor-concert manager green with envy.

Music matters:
Classical musics major encumbrance is its reputation as highbrow and
inaccessible. The evidence is all around, just in its language: andante
con moto, rondo capriccioso. The older audience uses this erudition
as a shield against nonbelievers. The younger audience, when it gains access
to the sanctum, is viewed with alarm. Its members are not always well-trained,
by the standards of their elders; they applaud in the wrong places, and
even cheer. The elders scowl as the opera houses install screens to project
translations of opera texts, crippling the out-of-reach reputation of what
Samuel Johnson once referred to as an exotic and irrational entertainment.
Yet the installation of supertitles, even at the Met, where they were opposed
the longest, has brought on a huge boost in opera-going and, more to the
point, opera-understanding. In the aforementioned RAND report on the state
of the performing arts (theater, dance, opera, classical, other), opera
was the only category that showed an income upswing over the past several
years.

The highbrow thing is on the wane. If the last century began as a time of
defiance and inventionSchoenberg, Stravinsky, those guysour
present and our future seem engulfed in a new wave of synthesis. Classical
composition at its most abstruse crested about 1980, in the gnarled working-out
of complex puzzle making as propounded by Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt.
Even as this style seems to have subsided in favor of the born-again tonality
of John Adams and Philip Glass, I detect some of that old-timey complexity
still hanging on, not among the latest graduates of Princeton and CalArts,
but in the advanced workmanship of some of the newer rockersRadiohead,
Sonic Youth, back to the well-nigh unplayable patterns of Frank Zappa. On
this side of the bridge, the best music by a so-called serious
(useless term!) composer Ive heard in recent months is the Passion
According to St. Mark by the Argentine/American/Jewish Osvaldo Golijov,
in which one of the archetypal musical formsthe Passion oratorio of
Bach and beforeis merged into a wildly exuberant Latino street celebration.
Classical? Pop? Highbrow? Lowbrow? All of the above?

John Seabrook came up with a pretty good answer in his latest books
title, Nobrow. Seabrook, a leading light among New Yorker staffers,
is thus in a position to witness the process he so rightly names from close-up,
as his own publication retreats from its famous nose-in-the-air stance and
becomes more relevant in the process. But nobrow as practiced
at The New Yorker isnt the same as the dumbing-down that also
afflicts the classical scene, the evil wrought by those who would speed
the transition from high- to no- at an unseemly rate. Exhibit A, the lurid
marketing circus called The Three Tenors, is followed close on by
the blatant falsification of the classical life in movies like Shine,
and in the exploitation, bordering on cruelty, of such sideshow creatures
as Shines David Helfgott and the pretty-voiced but hopelessly
adrift Andrea Bocelli. The dumbing-down process even spawns its own literature,
tomes with names like Whos Afraid of Classical Music and It
Isnt As Bad As It Sounds offering assurance to the tone-deaf-by-choice
among us that their number is legion.

Music
will survive as long as people want to listen to it. There are ways that
this can be made to happen, and they all come under the heading of Making
Music Matter, also known as Making People Care. The Philharmonics
Stravinsky Festival last February triumphantly demonstrated the process.
For a full month, awareness of Stravinskys achievements and importance
were deeply impressed on the local consciousness. Museums and universities
participated. Banners flew. At the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, video footage
of Stravinsky unfurled before each concert, almost as though the old boy
himself were there to welcome us. It helped, of course, that Esa-Pekka Salonen
wields a strong baton on Stravinskys behalf. Major critics from New
York and overseas knew enough to come by for these events, and they now
do so regularly. The term cultural desert, once regarded as
synonymous with Los Angeles music, seems to have vanished from the vocabulary.
Local newspaper criticism is no longer the trapeze act of virtuoso negativism
it once was, and I dont need to name names.

Down in Orange County, territory once looked upon by highbrow Angelenos
as dumdum land, the O.C. Philharmonic Societys Eclectic Orange
Festival, about to start its third run, has proved itself hugely adventurous
and, thus, hugely successful. You may have squirmed a bit at the Philip
Glass Fifth Symphony last year, but it took bravery beyond the call to bring
the work in soon after its headline-making premiere. (The Golijov Passion,
by the way, is on next seasons agenda.) The operative word in both
instances is, of course, festival. Its anybodys
guess whether the magic will rub off on another of our local heroes, Arnold
Schoenberg, whose music is being festivalized by both the Philharmonic
and the Opera this season. If it doesnt happen, it wont be for
lack of trying.

The corpse, in other words, continues to twitch.

Reprinted
with the kind permission of Alan Rich and the LA Weekly.

Alan Rich
writes his popular column,"A Lot of Night Music," for the LA
Weekly, a Los Angeles newspaper that appears every Thursday. "A
Sad Symphony With a Happy Ending" was originally published as the
feature cover story for the October 5, 2001 issue. To read more of his
columns, and to read more of the LA Weekly, please click on the
icon below.

[Photographs
by Anne Fishbein.] Located a few short steps off Cahuenga Boulevard [Hollywood]
and remarkably soundproofed from the whir of traffic is the elegant oasis
known as Robert Cauer Violins. Clients are greeted in a Victorian-furnished
waiting area, and the adjoining rooms are lined with neatly ordered stringed
instruments. The few privileged enough to see the guts of this operation
enter an extensive back area in which the needs of restoration and repair
sprawl into several specialized rooms. It is here that Cauer and his staff
coax impossible tangles of twisted strings and wood (like the one pictured
at the top) back to musical life. Anne Fishbein